Prepping Your Brand New Cloth Diapers

So you’ve taken the plunge. You’ve decided that you’re going to use cloth diapers. Now you’ve got this beautiful stack of fluff in front of you. What next? Prepping your cloth diapers for the first use is actually pretty simple. It depends completely on what kind of materials you’re using, but here’s a good run down that will help you out.

The first thing that you need to look at is if you’re using natural or synthetic fibers. I use mainly synthetic because I just like the absorbency of microfiber and microterry.

Synthetic – Wash it once using a good cloth diaper laundry routine, including a cloth diaper friendly detergent. Dry the inserts and the shells if the manufacturer instructions recommend it.

Natural – Wash three to five times, preferably not with your synthetic diapers. There are natural oils and such that are on your brand spanking new hemp or bamboo diapers that can impact the absorbency of your synthetics. If you’re only looking to prepare a couple of inserts, you can always boil them for ten to fifteen minutes. This is only if they are inserts or prefolds. If the diaper has any sort of elastic or PUL, boiling will destroy the diaper. So how do you prep those beautiful bamboo fitteds? You can always wash them on hot with your towels, but use a cloth diaper safe detergent.

Will you wreck your diapers if you initially wash them all together? No, of course not. You may end up with repelling issues and have to strip your diapers, but that’s still fixable (albeit time consuming). In the interest of true confessions, when I got my first bamboo diaper, I didn’t know any better and washed them all together. I got lucky and didn’t have issues, but that’s probably because it was only one diaper.

Or, to for a quick explanation on how to prep your new diapers: wash them. A lot. Synthetics with synthetics, organics with organics. After they’re prepped, you can wash them all together and they’ll live happily ever after.

Synthetics I’ve used and loved:

Flip by Cotton Babies with a microfiber insert

Best Bottom stay dry insert

Natural fiber inners I’ve used and loved:

Bummis Beautiful Basic (prefolds & cover)

Baby Kicks Joey Bunz Hemp Inserts

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